Tim Waggoner: Dark War

A soft knock sounded at the door then, and I thought our wait was finally over.

"Come in," I said, feeling a strange mixture of relief and tension. I wanted to get this show on the road, but at the same time, I was afraid of what a doctor's examination might ultimately reveal. But I needn't have worried. The person who opened the door and poked his head into the room wasn't a doctor.

"Is it all right if I come in?"

He was medium height, thin, with long brown hair tied in a pony tail and a neatly trimmed beard. A tie-dyed T-shirt, jeans, and sandals completed his bohemian look, and his pale skin and elongated canines marked him a vampire. Most Bloodborn – especially the older ones – tend to disdain technology, especially when it's used in body modification. Vampires are more than a little fanatical about maintaining the purity of their blood, and they view cybernetic enhancements as a corruption of the body. Not so the younger Bloodborn, though. Varney appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and while I had no idea how old he truly was, the fact that he possessed a pair of cybernetic implants told me he was relatively young as vampires went. Both his left eye and left ear had been removed and replaced with electronic devices: a camera lens and a miniature directional microphone, respectively.

I got off the bed and started walking toward Varney, making sure to keep myself between him and Devona.

"You'd better not be recording right now," I said in what I hoped was a threatening voice.

Not threatening enough, evidently, for Varney slid the rest of the way into the room, though he did raise his hands in a placating gesture. "It's cool, man. My camera's off. I totally respect you and your lady's privacy. Besides, this isn't the kind of footage my producer's looking for." He glanced at Devona. "No offense." He turned back to me. "Now if it was you lying injured in that bed, Matt…"

It took all the self-restraint I had not to let out a series of extremely offensive words. Not long ago, I'd had a run-in with a gorgon named Acantha, host of a live interview program called On the Scene. She'd tried to interview me while I was working and I was, shall we say, less than gracious about it. Since then Acantha had done her best to go out of her way to give me bad publicity whenever she could – and not just me: she made sure to include Devona and the Midnight Watch in her petty vendetta. So for Devona's sake, I'd gone to the Eidolon Building where the city's major media outlets – Mind's Eye Theatre, the Tome, Bedlam 66.6, and the Daily Atrocity – are housed and tried to make peace with Acantha. She responded to my overtures about as well as you might expect (gorgons can carry grudges for centuries), but her boss, a demon named Murdock, overheard our conversation and pulled me into his office.

You want Acantha to lay off you and your woman? he'd said. I can arrange that. And then he'd smiled that smile demons give you when they're about to make you an offer you know you really should refuse. And when I heard his proposal, I turned him down at first. Until I spoke with Devona later.

I think it's flattering that Murdock wants to make a documentary about you, she'd said. You have to admit, you've become something of a celebrity over the last few months, and it's only natural people would want to know more about you. And if people get to know you – the city's only self-willed zombie – a little better, it might change their attitude toward the reanimated dead. And then she'd added the kicker. Besides, the publicity would be good for business.

So I called Murdock and told him I'd be honored to let him make a documentary about me, which is how I got saddled with Varney, the one-man – or maybe I should say one-vampire – film crew. With his cybernetic enhancements, all he had to do was follow me around and anything he saw and heard would be recorded. Every night he transmitted the day's footage to the Mind's Eye studio via the Aethernet, where it was reviewed and edited by his producer. Varney had been tailing me for five days now, and my patience with him was wearing more than a little thin. Despite the fact that he'd told me when we met that he'd "be as invisible as Casper, man," while I worked, Varney had a tendency to get in the way, and I'd begun looking for opportunities to ditch him whenever I could.

Varney went on. "I don't mean to intrude, but I just wanted to check in with you guys and see how things went in the other Nekropolis."

Varney had been waiting for us in Bennie's lounge when Darius brought us back, but I'd rushed Devona out of there so fast that he hadn't had a chance to talk to us – or get in Lazlo's cab and ride along to the hospital – which is just the way I'd wanted it. I figured he'd catch up to us sooner or later. Unfortunately, it hadn't been later enough for me.

"This really isn't a good time," I told him. "How about you go back to the Eidolon Building, and I'll give you a call later?"

"Matt…" Devona said in that tone she uses when she thinks I'm being unreasonable. But the last thing I cared about right then was helping Varney with the stupid documentary. All that mattered to me was Devona and the baby's health.

Varney smiled. "Don't sweat it, man. I got it covered." He held out his hand and a small silver object about the size of a thumbnail crawled out from beneath my jacket lapel. It looked a little like a mechanical ant, except it had a miniature camera lens in place of a head. As I watched, wings slid out of tiny panels in the artificial insect's back, and the creature took wing. It buzzed over to Varney, and the vampire opened his mouth, and the bug flew inside. Varney then closed his mouth and grinned.

"That's icky," Devona said.

"When I couldn't go with you to the other Nekropolis, I snuck a portable camera onto you when you weren't looking. The quality of its recording isn't quite as good as what I can do, but it'll serve in a pinch. Just let me start downloading…" He paused and his expression went blank. "Yeah… yeah, that's some good stuff." He looked at me and grinned. "My producer is gonna love it!"

I sighed. It seemed I couldn't get away from Varney no matter what I did. "Do me a favor: don't put any more of those damned things on me without my permission, OK? We dead folk have a thing about bugs."

While that was true enough, the real reason I disliked carrying around an insect – even a machine that resembled an insect – was because of an experience I'd had several months back with a friend of mine named Gregor. At least, I thought he'd been a friend. As it turned out, he'd been something far different. He was gone now, but I still didn't like bugs, and I especially didn't like them riding around concealed on me.

"Sure thing," Varney said. "Whatever you say, Matt."

What I wanted to say next was less than polite and would've earned me another disapproving Matt from Devona, but a second knock sounded at the door before I could speak, this one sharp and businesslike. The door opened and a woman wearing a white doctor's coat walked in. She was a tall, thin Bloodborn woman, with short black hair and porcelain-white skin. Her lips were full and red, and I knew that she'd recently dined. But considering this was a hospital, I figured the staff had ready access to fresh blood. She appeared young – barely out of her teens – but she moved with the preternatural stillness that only very old vampires were capable of.

She crossed to Devona's bed with brisk strides, ignoring Varney as she passed, but when she saw me her brow furrowed and her lips pursed in distaste.

"What is this thing doing here?" she demanded in an icy tone. "This is a hospital room, not the morgue."

Devona scowled. "This thing is my husband, and I want him here."

It didn't surprise me that Devona stuck up for me. It wasn't the first time she'd done so. While Nekropolitans could be quite liberal-minded about some things, the idea of anyone having a zombie for a romantic partner was, to put it mildly, out of the ordinary, and people tended to have varying reactions when they saw us together. What surprised me was hearing Devona refer to me as her husband. We weren't married, not in any legal sense of the word. Before relocating to Nekropolis to escape the always-increasing human population, the Darkfolk had tended to live in isolated pockets and out-of-the-way places. They hadn't really had anything like a centralized government, so there was no need for formal laws. If one Darkfolk wanted to have a long-term romantic relationship with another, they just did so without worrying about any kind of legally binding agreement. Besides, the concept of holy matrimony didn't sit well with the more diabolical members of the Darkfolk. And so there were no priests or justices of the peace to marry people in Nekropolis – at least as far as I knew – and the issue had never come up between Devona and me, despite the fact that we'd been living together for a while now and she was carrying my child.